4 Terminal Tricks for Customizing your OS X Dock

You can easily utilize apps like TinkerTool and MacPilot to customize your Dock, or you can be a real superstar and use a couple of Terminal tricks. There are a ton of Dock tricks you can do, but here are four that are practical and easy to do. Follow along to learn how to pin your dock to one size, get super enlarged icons, turn your 3D Dock into a 2D Dock and disable Dashboard -- once a for all!

1. Turn Your 3D Dock into a 2D Dock

Recognize this? It's the Dock style that normally appears when you pin it to the left or right.

Open Terminal and type in the following two commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

killall Dock

The dock will now look 2D. If you want your reflective Dock back, just replace the “YES” in the above statement with a “NO” and re-run the two commands.

2. Pin Your Dock to the Left or Right

Using the end string, you can pin your Dock to the right-hand side of the screen.

You can pin your Dock to the left, right, or middle of the screen. To pin it to the left-hand side of the screen, type the following two commands:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string start

killall Dock

Replace “start” in the above statement with “end” to pin the Dock to the right-hand side of the screen, or “middle” to return to the default middle of the screen position.

3. Disable Dashboard

For many, Dashboard is not a tool they use very often. You can disable it by typing in the following two commands in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

killall dock

After doing that, you will no longer be able to activate Dashboard. But if for some reason you want to re-enable it, just replace the “YES” above with “NO” and re-run the two commands in Terminal.

4. Increase Dock Magnification Past Allowable Size

Admittedly, it's not very practical.

Apple has allowed a maximum maginification size of 128 pixels for their Dock magnification size. However, the following Terminal trick will increase that size to 256 pixels instead:

defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -float 256.000000

killall Dock

To change the size back to the Apple-allowed maximum, replace “256” in the above statement with “128” and re-run the two commands. You can then adjust the size in System Preferences > Dock.